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'—LETTEBS 127
As a rule he does not actually interpolate much,
but rather touches up the lines by adding epithets and adverbs, doing what Gray called " sticking a flower in the buttonhole."
It is strange that FitzGerald was able to do the
very thing for Omar that he could not do for Calderon; to seize and represent and even add intensity to the very essence of the writer. But though Calderon has been called by so fine a critic as Lowell an Arab soul in Spanish feathers, it is a misapprehension. There is nothing Oriental about Calderon. He is a Euro- pean, a modern, one of ourselves; and it was precisely with the modern spirit that FitzGerald was not in sympathy, whereas he was to a considerable extent in sympathy with the Oriental spirit. Again, the variety of metrical forms used in the Spanish drama is remarkable. Calderon varies his measures with great skill and frequency, never sinking to prose; and thus the effect of the blank verse with occasional rhyme endings, interspersed with a few lyrical passages and even many passages of plain prose, employed by Fitz- Gerald is misleading and monotonous. Shelley's version of the Magico frodigioso is far more Calder- onian than anything in FitzG-erald, and proves that to represent Calderon in English was not an altogether impossible task.
It may be noted that FitzGerald's knowledge of
Spanish was very limited. And again, it is clear that FitzGerald is very unsure about quantities, and that the accent shifts, in the proper names he uses, from syllable to syllable in a perplexing way. This I shows that he was not really very familiar with the
I language; and lastly, it appears that he had frequent
I recourse to his dictionary even when reading Cer-
I vantes. If this wa^s so with Cervantes, it must
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